The Giant Email Marketing Statistics Guide

It's not a new craze sweeping the nation – it's just a rock-solid, time-tested method to keep your customers hooked and coming back for more. With the help of this epic infographic, you are about to witness how effective email marketing statistics can truly change your business. So, stick around and grab some snacks, because this is a big one. If you want to try any of our spam filtering products just click the live chat button on the right.

Slightly Higher Brand Connection Than Social Media

This is partly due to the fact that just about everyone has an email address, while Twitter and Facebook still don't reach as many users. It is also easier for a brand with an established relationship with a customer to get their hands on emails, during the ordering process or elsewhere, as opposed to social media where the user must take extra steps.

A large majority of people (72%) reported that they prefer to receive promotional content through email, as opposed to only 17% who prefer to receive this material on social media.

Still Too Much Spam

Almost half of all messages sent are plain old disgusting spam. Everyone with an email account has seen how bad it can be, particularly when being careless giving out their address all over the place.

About 45% of users will report your email as spam because they feel like you're contacting them too often. 36% do so because they believe they never subscribed to begin with, and 31% hit the report button because of irrelevant content.

Battle of the Sexes

The conversion rates in these email marketing statistics for men and women seem fairly even at first glance, until you go a little deeper in to the data. On desktop computers the rate is exactly the same for both, at 62%. Men tend to react more often to mobile email marketing on their phones, while women take action on their tablets at a higher rate.

When it comes to grabbing the customer's attention, almost twice as many women pay attention to marketing emails compared to men – 14% to 8%. In contrast to that, men actually open the email slightly more than women – about 17% to 14%.

A higher percentage of men (17%) feel that formal emails are more legitimate, as opposed to only 10% of women. Understandably, 74% of females prefer gender-neutral marketing. So, the lesson here is that being overly formal is not much of a bonus to either men or women, but females feel like they are being left out of the conversation due to the wording and/or imagery of some messages.

Unsubscribing and Deleting

Almost all businesses use mailing lists to produce sales. This is not much of a surprise, but what is surprising is that 76% of subscribers have actually made a purchase from the messages they receive.

The news is not all good on this front though. Around one third of consumers mark messages as spam which they deem to be advertising. This means that they are basically lost forever as potential customers. Another two thirds unsubscribe because they feel like the messages are irrelevant to them at the time, and 69% delete marketing messages because they simply get too many of them.

The reasons for this generally come down to one main point: people are getting put on mailing lists without actually wanting to be on them. They may have been warned ahead of time, buried in the terms and conditions somewhere, but people usually don't read all of that fine print. In order to lower the annoyance factor of your messages, you may want to make it clearer as to what people are getting themselves in to before they are added.

Automation Software

Just over half (58%) of the top performing companies use some form of automation to get their messages out to potential customers. This obviously comes in handy when you want to schedule the emails to arrive at the best time possible for maximum opening rate. The specifics on what time of day generates more interest will be discussed below.

Revenue

This is perhaps one of the most important email marketing facts that businesses want to know about – how much revenue does it bring in?

Trigger-based emails proved to be a big success. This type of message – sent after a potential customer “triggers” it through an action such as an abandoned shopping cart – saw an increase in revenue of 50%. This is partly due to the fact that these people had already shown interest in the brand, and also due to the timely follow-up through email which keeps it fresh in their mind.

Smaller but substantial increases in revenue were also found through reengaging with serial comparison shoppers and targeted category sales, at 15% and 14% respectively. These findings should come as no surprise, as it only makes sense that targeting a product to particular audience behavior is a winning strategy.

Actions Taken

When a customer receives a commercial email, they are much more likely to make the purchase online as opposed to visiting a retail store. The number of people who still enjoy going to a store, or ordering by phone, cannot be dismissed though as they still make up a decent chunk of purchases. This is particularly important for certain businesses in areas such as high-end technology, jewelry, and other fashion-related products.

Improving CTR

As we have witnessed in other areas of this guide, getting personal is a good thing when handled correctly. In general, personalized email messages saw an average increase of 14% in CTR and 10% in conversions, making it a key point to consider in email marketing statistics and customer outreach.

The most common form of personalization, and the easiest to accomplish, is to add the recipient's first name in the subject of the message.

CTR went up by 158% through the addition of buttons to share the content on social media. This may not result in an immediate sale, but it spreads brand awareness nonetheless.

Email Marketing Conversion Rate

The poor old Blackberry has seen better days, as it only accounted for 0.01% of emails opened, and the Windows Phone doesn't do much better at 0.16%. In general though, smartphones account for almost half of all emails opened, with iPhone the clear leader at 38% compared to about 9% on Android.

Desktop computers are still in the running at around 34%, and 18% for tablets, so it would be wise to accommodate your viewers on larger screens as well as phones.

After the email has been opened, less than 3% of viewers will actually click through on a retail message.

ROI

The Return On Investment is quite high overall for email marketing campaigns, coming in at 3800%, or $38 generated from a $1 investment. This seems to say less about how effective the messages actually are, and more about how inexpensive it is to run this type of campaign.

Email on Mobile Devices

This is another of the most important email marketing benchmarks to be aware of. 70% of consumers will delete your message immediately if it does not render properly on their mobile device.

Mobile devices account for just over half of email opens, but only one third of all clicks within the message. By studying the numbers we can surmise that the majority of people still prefer to browse websites and shop on a larger screen. They may open your message for the first time on a mobile device, but more often than not they will actually be visiting your website from a larger screen.

Subject Lines

In another surprise finding, the length of the subject line on emails doesn't really seem to make much difference. Whether the length is 10 characters or 50, the read rate remains fairly steady with an average around 12%.

As for the content of the subject itself, those with clear indications as to the company name and purpose of the message lead to higher email marketing open rates. Generic and impersonal subject lines fared much, much worse.

Best Time To Send Emails

The data shows that the number of emails sent on weekdays are fairly constant at around 17% from Monday to Thursday, with a small drop off on Friday and then going down by half on weekends.

As for the best time of day to send them, 8AM had an open rate of 6%. This is most likely due to the fact that people are getting in to work around that time. They have their first coffee in hand, and they're checking up on emails before getting down to business. By sending at this time of day, the email will be higher up in their inbox.

That brings us to the end of this email marketing statistics 2016 guide. Hopefully you learned at least a few new tips and tricks for your next campaign. It's important to remember though, your own trial and error can be some of the most valuable research of all. Keep track of every change you make, and keep striving for that perfect message.